Friday 1 February 2008 19.17 EST
First published on Friday 1 February 2008 19.17 EST

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer

by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin721pp, Atlantic, £25

More than any man, J Robert Oppenheimer represents to us the insufferable burden of the nuclear age. The "father of the atomic bomb", he was tormented by the consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and hounded as much by his conscience as by the hysterical red-baiters in Washington.

The tragic and heroic themes of Oppenheimer's life, with its high mental endeavour and arcadian American locations, have long appealed to those of a literary or dramatic turn. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, in a biography 30 years in the making, attempt instead to unravel the complications of a brilliant and vain human being.

How did a "rich, spoiled, Jewish brat from New York", as his friend Isidor Rabi called him, an awkward prodigy with a taste for the Bhagavad Gita, become the pragmatic leader of 6,000 men and women on the mesa at Los Alamos? How did this exquisite soul end up warning the United States Air Force not to drop the Hiroshima bomb through cloud? How was the greatest mind of his generation reduced to a shadow by bureaucratic thugs such as J Edgar Hoover and Admiral Lewis Strauss?

In this long book, there is no mathematics and very little physics. There is little about the engineering of the "gadget" tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. Instead we learn that years later in St John, Virgin Islands, Oppenheimer could not look at a turtle for the memory of all the dumb creatures he had killed in the blast at Alamogordo.

Here, as it were, are the cocktails and wire-taps and love affairs of Oppenheimer's existence, his looks and conversation, the way he smoked the cigarettes and pipe that killed him, his famous pork-pie hat and splayed walk, and all the tics and affectations that his students imitated and the patriots and military men despised. It is as if these authors had gone back to James Boswell, who said of Dr Johnson: "Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing."

Joseph Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1904 into a high-minded New York family, with a successful garment business and and a sensational collection of modern pictures. Robert's father, a respectable immigrant from Frankfurt, sold out before the 1929 crash and Robert himself was always well off.

Having majored in chemistry at Harvard, Oppenheimer was attracted by physics at Cambridge University, where he showed himself to be quite useless in the laboratory and passed through an intense mental crisis which all but felled him. "Oppenheimer is a Jew," his tutor wrote to Max Born in recommending him for the more theoretical school at Göttingen, "but entirely without the usual qualifications of his race."

At Göttingen, Oppenheimer made himself so obnoxious that the other students petitioned Born to rein in the "child prodigy". None the less, he caught the tail end of the great advance in quantum mechanics in the Europe of the 1920s, and published a series of theoretical papers that these authors treat with the utmost caution.

Teaching at the University of California at Berkeley and at Caltech in Pasadena, "Oppie" brought the new European physics to the west coast, as he was later to bring the European physicists to Los Alamos. He spent summers in New Mexico, where he leased a small ranch in the sierras called Perro Caliente ("Hot Dog") and played the Jewish cowboy. "My two great loves," he wrote in 1929, "are physics and New Mexico. It is a pity they can't be combined." During the depression, Oppenheimer was active in progressive politics on the west coast and had communist friends; in 1940 he married Kitty Puening, the widow of a Spanish war veteran and herself a former party member, as was Oppenheimer's brother, Frank.

For Bird and Sherwin, Oppenheimer was a typical fellow-travelling New Deal progressive, who had worries about Spain and segregated swimming-pools knocked out of him by Pearl Harbor. Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation did not think so and in 1941 had him on a list of "persons to be considered for custodial detention in the event of a national emergency". However, in October 1942, General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, picked Oppenheimer to lead the scientific team that would build the atomic bomb at the site of a former boarding school at Los Alamos.

Some time in the course of the winter, as Oppenheimer was making a tray of his famous martinis in the kitchen of his house at Berkeley, there occurred a small event that was to detonate his career. The facts are in dispute, but it seems a colleague named Haakon Chevalier came into the kitchen and passed on at second-hand a request for information from the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Oppenheimer did not report the approach until the following June and then in words that he later retracted. The Chevalier meeting - or rather Oppenheimer's contradictory accounts of it - were to be his Damoclean sword or what he called (after Henry James) "the beast in the jungle".

Amid the pinewoods and plywood barracks and gimcrack laboratories of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer turned out to be an inspiring leader. Enrico Fermi once turned to him and said: "I believe your people actually want to make a bomb."

Yet Oppenheimer was haunted by Hiroshima and came to believe that the Japanese were already "essentially defeated". He despised the science at Los Alamos. As director of the Intstitute of Advanced Study at Princeton and as chief scientific adviser of the new Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer campaigned to push the atomic genie, if not back into the bottle, at least into international control. His meeting with President Harry Truman in October 1945 was a fiasco, and the president took to calling him that "crybaby scientist". He infuriated the military and Strauss, a former banker appointed by Truman to chair the commission, by his opposition to plans to build a "super" or hydrogen bomb a thousand times more lethal than the Los Alamos weapons.

Oppenheimer later felt he should have resigned as adviser to the commission in January 1950, when Truman approved the testing of the hydogen bomb, but he had gained a taste for political Washington even in its anti-communist hysteria. Albert Einstein, his friend and colleague at Princeton, got him in one: "The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him - the United States government."

Strauss not only suspected Oppenheimer of treachery but hated him for his arrogance. He conspired in 1953 to have Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked. Oppenheimer appealed. The so-called Gray board hearing of April 1954 runs here to 70 pages and is quite enthralling. In this star chamber of peculiarly American character, Oppenheimer lost his head under brutal questioning or desolately chain-smoked on a couch behind the witness chair. Strauss and Hoover were not content just to disgrace him. Covinced Oppenheimer was about to defect to the Soviets, they assigned six FBI agents to his house in Princeton. His later years were passed there or in a beachcomber idyll in St John, sailing, mixing cocktails and feuding with neighbours. Often delphic in his utterances, he now became impenetrable. Restored to a measure of honour by the Democratic administrations of the 60s, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1969.

The fine text is matched by fine photographs. One shows Oppenheimer up on the tower at Alamogordo, in profile at dusk of the last day, wearing his pork-pie hat, making alterations. Turn over, and there is the abomination of Hiroshima. He ages in a flash. His hair turns white, as if nothing Strauss could do to him his own heart could not do better. Kitty Oppenheimer, frustrated and alcoholic, and two bewildered children show their share in the torment. Einstein, an altogether hardier personality, said one evening in Princeton as Oppenheimer walked him home: "You know, when it's once been given to a man to do something sensible, afterward life is a little strange."